Two Beach Towns Try to Cope With the Trouble Summer Crowds Bring : Impact: Newport and Huntington are looking at ways to curb near-riotous atmosphere of peak weekends.

The trouble began in the summer of 1986 on the sand at Newport Beach and Huntington Beach.

First, nearly 160 people were arrested and several police officers were injured on July 4 in Newport in a rock- and bottle-throwing melee. The same thing happened at the end of August on Labor Day weekend in Huntington Beach, except people there also rushed a large lifeguard station and overturned and burned police cars. At least 40 people were injured.

That year, both cities moved to improve their plans for controlling crowds, restocked their riot gear and made sure plenty of officers worked holiday weekends--in cars, on bikes and on foot.

Tonight, the Newport Beach City Council will take another look at its crowd control policies to see whether they again need bolstering. This latest review is prompted by another rough Fourth of July weekend, which saw a triple shooting, a stabbing and a baseball bat assault.

Residents in west Newport Beach, where most of the city’s 225 arrests were made that weekend, have been calling Mayor Phil Sansone’s office demanding action to curb the near-riotous atmosphere of peak summer weekends, he said.

The City Council will review a police summary of what happened Fourth of July weekend and consider whether more changes are needed in the current plan to deal with disturbances.

“It boils down to limiting the number of people present in one place at one time,” Sansone said. “We’ve got to get a handle on what’s attracting them in there in the first place and then remove it.”

In 1986, Newport Beach authorities approved laws to declare a curfew or close down any portion of the city where they believed lives or property were in danger.

Tonight, officials will consider also limiting the number of people allowed into an area at a time, Sansone said. On July 4, the hordes of pedestrians, skaters and bicyclists got so thick on Seashore Drive that paramedics had a hard time getting to a home where a man reportedly fell off a balcony and suffered minor injuries.

“We’ve got to do something if a rescue vehicle can’t even get from Point A to Point B,” Sansone said.

Another option would be to close the beach an hour earlier, at 10 p.m. instead of 11, which Balboa Peninsula residents were advocating even before the Fourth of July, said Dayna Pettit, a longtime resident there.

Newport residents say they are worried that revelers forced to leave Huntington State Beach, which like other state beaches has a new closing time of 10 p.m., will gravitate south and spend the additional hour drinking and partying on Newport’s beaches. Sansone has asked city and law enforcement officials to study the possibility of an earlier beach curfew.

“Fun is one thing, but when they start drinking too much, it can lead to violence,” Pettit said.

Police Lt. Tim Newman said that for police officers, the Fourth of July “means a long weekend of work and not being able to be with our families. But that’s part of the job.”

The entire force of 150 worked 12-hour shifts during the three-day weekend, he said. Also helping were 50 officers from the California Highway Patrol and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Most of the nearly 230 officers in Huntington Beach also worked 12-hour shifts during the holiday and expect a repeat next weekend, when the city celebrates the opening of the new pier, Lt. Ed McErlain said.

“We make sure that an adequate number of officers is visible at all times,” Huntington Beach Mayor Jim Silva said. “When you have that, we don’t have a lot of problems.”

That was one of the lessons learned in 1986.

The Huntington Beach riot in 1986 started about 2 p.m. Aug. 31 behind bleachers being used for the final day of the Ocean Pacific Pro Surfing Championships, which drew a crowd of nearly 100,000 people, authorities said.

Hoping to prevent a repeat, the City Council later toughened liquor control for organized events at the beach. They also voted to have the contest some time other than the Labor Day weekend, and to have it in the morning, before the audience had time to drink, Silva said.

Jan Shomaker, a resident in downtown Huntington Beach and a member of the Board of Realtors for Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley, called the 1986 disturbance an “aberration.”

Trouble “didn’t happen before that and it hasn’t happened since,” Shomaker said. “It speaks well for our police force.”